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P 7 /, wy DEVOTED.TO ne “COMME VOL. V. NO. 85. 00 PER ANNUM SINGLE Copies 5 CENTS, CLEVELAND, 0., AUGUST 30, 1883. PROPELLERS ON 'THE GREAT LAKEs. Our attention has been called to the fol- lowing article in Mechanics, written by J. F, Holloway, President of the Cuyahoga Works :. ; I have ju-t received from a friend 2 news- paper clipping, in which the writer takes exception to the claims made in the paper which I read before the Cleveland meeting of the Americnn Society of Mechanical En- ineers, that the first commercial auccvess Of the screw propeller was upon the great in- Jand lakes. . Before replying to the gentleman, I desire to enter two “disclaimers,” the first being that I did notintend to mislead the engineers betore whom I spoke, and the second is that I -did not intend to institute a comparison between the early use of screw propellers here on the lukes as against “the wide, wide world.” I tully agree with the writer in awarding high. praise to Captain John Erics- gon, not only forthe valuable invention he made in the shape of the propeller wheel, - and which he patente Lin England, but also success he had in the construction of tne Robert F. Stockton, built in England, but which waa afterwards sent to this coun- try and used on the Delaware and Rari- tan Canal.. This propeller was the model from which numerous similar canal propel- Jers were built, and by means of which a steam transportation ling was had» between -Balsimore, Philadelphia and New. York. I i the impression that the engines for ies boats eS mostly built in Phita- delphia and: Baltimore, and I do not think any of the establishments named in my pa- er builtany of these engineer. "The first screw propeller that sailed these Jakes was built in 1841, and it was called the Vandalia. . Captain B. A. Stanard, the vet- eran luke navigator, who fitted out and sailed the brig Rumsey Crook for John Ja- cob Astor and the American Fur Co., says he well remembers the first glimpse he had of the first screw steamer. J up the lakes and was tacking with the wind head, when he saw in the distance what seemed to be a queer-Igoking cratt, also headed up the lake, but. without much, it : sail. Ashe stood off and on, he gained ai her until he came close to her, and saw that she had a wheel in the stern, and it was driven by steam. After having satisfied his curiosity, sailor-like, he shook out another reef in his canvas and swung away up the lakes to hunt up Indian encampments and eltry, leaving the little puffing steamer to awl along as best it could. ‘The little screw, however, had come to stay, and it was soon followed by others, and they have gradually increased in eize, power and speed, until now the largest wind boats atlout are con- tent to let the screw take the lead, if they will but hang out a tow-line behind to which they can cling. I could give a long list of names of boats that were built soon after the Vandalia, but do not deem it necessary. About 1848 or 1849 Horatio Allen, then at the hend o' the Novelty Works, New York, genta gentlemen out to the lakes to learn what he could in regard to screw propellers, This gentleman said he had come to the lakes for the reason that they did not build pro- ailers of any size on the sea coast, and that biey knew little or nothing abont them. He further said that.a coal company, of which Mr. Horatio Allen was president, were about to build propellers to carry cgal from George- town, Va., to New York and along the New England coast, and they. wanted to procure ylans for the hulls and engines, I met the vontlemen on the deck of a new propeller, fi engine of which had been built from deswiogs I had made, and so well was he steased with the engine that he made an ar- P ngement by which I gave him a copy ot the drawings to take east to show to his com- any. ‘I'he coal company afterward built tye screw propellerr, the hulls of which were built near Pittsburgh, Pa., and the en- ines were built in Pittsburgh, under my “a ervision, and [have yet the old, dingy H rude drawing, made when I was but juet out of boyhood, but which [I now value ight for across one corner of it are writ- ten these words: ‘Approved. Horatio rp? fe wget f the article to which I have y iter 0 referred 2878 that duriug all this time the * He was beund’ Allaire, Secor and Novelty Works were building screw) propellers as large as could be used for the coast trade, which limited their capacity on account of the shoal water over the sand bars and in the harbors, ‘This may be true, but Cam not aware that either the sand bars or the harbors of many of the important towns or cities on the sea const have been greatly improved in this respect since that time; and it is news to me to be told that the establishments named ever built any propeller e-gines of any con-ider- able size, or even supplied engines for the canal propellers in use on the inland canals; but Lam quite certain that at least some of them continued to build beam engines and paddle-wheel -steamers for the: ocean and coasting trade long after every other nation had ceased to do so, nnd long after they had ceased to be profitable. It is well known that the steamer Vanderbilt, which for a time ran between New York and Havre, with its two beam engines and its two 90- inch by 12 foot stroke cylinders, was enor- mously expensive to run, and that the gift by Vanderbilt of this steamer to the United States government was by no means “a blessing in disguise,” but that it was, even in the hands of the United States, ‘a white elephant” of Jumbo proportions. The his- tory of the famous Collins Line of side-whvel steamers is one not only of interest to en- gineeir, but as well of sorrow to those whose money built them; and ‘tis now very-eyi- ent that it was not the thing-to do iit.a time when English ship owners and English en- ginecrs were taking paddle-wheel engines out of ships and putting screw engines in their place. 1 think the people of this coun- try would have bad less occasion to mourn over the “decadence of the American ma- rine” it| our shipbuilders had not been so persistent in'their belief in the superiority of the beam engine and side wheels over the screw propeller for marine purposes. In the paper L read before the Mechanical Engineers [ did not take the time to name any of the luke steamers from which the beam engine had been. removed, but do so now in order to set myselt right on that question. ‘The steamer Queen of the West, having a bean engine 80-inch bore, 12-foot stroke, was dismantled, and the engine ta- ken to New York and put into the Evening Star, of the New Orleans trade. ‘The engine of the Crescent City, same kind and size en- gine as above, was put into the steamer Morning Star, same trade, ‘The engine of the Mississippi, same size, went into the Guiding Star, New Orleans and European trade. ‘The machinery of the St. Lawrence, with steam cylinder, 81-inch bore, 12-foot stroke, was put into the steamer Fo-Kein, for the China trade. ‘he western Metropo- lis machinery went into a steamship of the same name, and was used for the New Or- leans and European trade. The machinery of tho Southern Michigan was put intoa Hudson river boat. ‘I'ne machinery of the Western World went into a China ship cailed, I think, the Fire Qneen, and that of the Plymouth Rock into a China ship, name not Known. Possibly I claimed much for the ship own- ers and for the pioneer engineers who built the early screw propeller used here, when I claimed that they were much 1n advance of the sea coast in making the screw stenmer a success for carrying freight and passengers, but Mr. Edward H. Knight, whom none will question as authority on such a matter, goes mvueh further than I did, when he says: “Several years before screav propulsion had assumed any commercial importance in Ongland, the carrying trade on our lakes was toa great extent conducted by screw vessels.”” : It is said that northern markets are glut- ted with southern pine lumber. Some of the large saw mill proprietors are anxious to have the the mills combine and decrease production in order to bring the market into amore healthy state. The production for shipment to the northern ports about four- teen months ago averaged 750,000 feet per day. ‘The production now for shipment, it is said, amounts to 1,500,000 feet per day. on, ‘Tur Buckeye Engine Co., of Salem, Ohir, is having a season of activity. sed-ip only, while aft it tupers, te an NEW FORMS FOR BOAtS. From the Scientific Ameri:an, ‘Two voats have been recently chronicled in the papers, which make in each case a de- cided departure from the old type, and we may say the stereotype, which has to a cer- tain extent ruled all shipbuilding from the day of Noah down, For muchas models vary, they all seemed to be planned on one principle—the boat must take deep hold of the water; and especially is this held to be true in the rough service of thé open sea. In any one, for instance, of our splendid ovean steamers, her breadth of beam = dees not much exceed one-tenth of her length, and of course therefore her draught is so great that Sandy Hook searee gives water enough to float her without watehing for the tide. Now, is this necessary? Are we bound to go on in the same. way, or is it one of the nursery legends which have come down to us by inheritance, and with which, when we learn to goit alone, we can dispense ? The two plans of boats to which ref- erence has been tnnde turn our attentior. to- ward this matter. The first one wns evi- dently intended only aga pleasure boat, and to be of small size, but it was original in its design. It wae to‘have the general propor- tions of a cattish, that is, the. bullhead of Conuecticut,, or aninister and bull pout of Massachusetts, the Amiurus nebulosus. ‘This brings the bow broad and flat, the breadth carried very well forward, and gently round- OW waist and wedge like stern, with noth ug there to make her drag the water in the least. “The greatest breadth away out quite near the bow, will be xbont one-fifth of the lengih of the keel. What this peculiar oaild will do remains to be seen. Lt is certatnly unlike any ordi- nary model, and it is much to be hoped that its results, whether satisfactory or not, may be made public. The trials whieh fail are of perhaps the most interest and advantage to every one except the originator, In the other case there was not absolutely anything new. It was a small steamer con- rstructed for a sugar estate on the Magdalena river, and to secure a sufliciently light drift, her beam was about one-fourth of ber length, with full bearings carried well fore and aft, yet without really a flat bottom, tine Jines being’ her general characteristic. With a length of 54 feet ber extreme draught is to be only two feet. This for river navigation is nothing ape cial. We all know the swarms of Mississi pp boats “built to run anywhere that the ground is a little damp.”’ But the peculiar- ity of this little craft is that she is to be run out to the Magdalena river on her own mer- ite, by her own power. And there is where the difficulty eeems to come in, and so much so that the captain is guaranteed a special extra payment if he makes the trip success. fwly. It is apparently taken for’ granted that the long surghs of the Atlantic, and perhaps in particular of the Caribbean, will pitch her about and drive her before them at such a rate that she can never give a good account of herself. Because foreooth she dees not go down in- to them, but floats lightly over them, they will knock her here and there like a bubble. Well, let them knock, what harm will it do? If she has strength to stand the run of the sea, Why should she not be lifted easily above it, instead of having every timber wrenched and strained in the effort to come up trough it. No one ean stand well forward and watch an ordinary steamship as she is plunging in- to a heavy head sea, anu see her come rush- ing down a long swell through the trough, without being conscious of the terrible strain which comes upon her, as she buries herself in the next sea before she begins to rise. Her sharp bow cuts into it like a knife, and away down, down she goes before her dis- placement is able to overbalance her weight and her downward plunge, and then event- ually she lifts and goes over. If now, instead of this knife edge she had had the breadth forward which would have rendered impossible any such depth of sub- mersion, whose amount of displacement would have sent her over the coming sea when instead of plunging thirty feet down into it she had hardly buried herself a fath- | om, What laws of hydrodynamics will show j that in this latter case ad cidedly important partof the strain upon her timbers would not have been avoiced? “We are perfectly well aware that we shall at once be told that all this question of bluff bows and sharp bows has been settled yeurs ago, that every ove knows sharpness and speed are but con- vertible terms, and that for sea going craft the deep keel or its equivalent is indispensa- ble, Very good! Perhaps all this may be so, and then again perhaps it may not. We. are entitled to our own free juegment, and some time by and by we may give the rea- sons tor what we believe as to it. ACCEI ERATION OF MACHINERY, From the Boston Commercial Bulletin. A tactor often overlooked by statisticians in estimating the capacities ot our mills and factories, is the marked increase in the speed of machinery brought about within-a few years. ‘Thus tne cotton machinery of Lowell has been accelerared 30 per cent within a dozen years, and while there are now 12,- 900.000 cotton spindles in the United States against 7.000,0C0 in 1870, the actual produe- tive capacity of tne mils is more than doubled. ‘The consumpticn of 1,988,417 bales of cotton in the country for the ten months preceding July 1, 1883, against 1,073,000 bales, the annnal average for three years be- ginning with 1869, corroborates the above estimate. ‘The sime holds true of woolen’ manufacturing. The fasterepsecd ig of the: tachinery has been coupled with a consid-- erable enlargement of She ‘cards, and the in- creased production largely benetits the con- sumer, Of course, by materially cheapeuing: the cost of making goods, ENGINEERING AND MECHANICAL. A ureful improvement in discharge pipes for dredging sand pumps and other ma- ehines has recently been patented. by Mr. James M. Buckley, of Portland, Oregon. The novelty of the invention consists in a revolving discharge pipe, whereby the ma- terial passing through it is prevented from setiling therein, rendering the quantity of water usually required to force the earthy materials through the discharge pipe. A composition hasbeen invented by MM. Dankworth and Landers of St. Petersburg, which is reported to be tough, elastic, waterproof, ivsoluble—ir short, a nearly sufficient substitute for india rubber. It is smposed of a mixture of wood and coal tar, .nseed oil, ozokerite, spermaceti, and sul- phur, which are thoroughly mixed ana heated for a long time in large vessels by means of superheated steam. A rotary steam ergine of novel construc- tion has recently been patented by Mr. John Andrew Knight, of Marlborough, N. H. The rotating wheel carries a series of steam cylinders containing piston and piston rods- for rotating crank shafts journaled in the wheel. ‘These crank shafts carry cog wheels which engage with a fixed cog wheel on the frame, wherby when the steam is admitted into the eylinder the cog wheels on the erank shatts will be rotated, and. as they ehguge | with the fixed cog wheel, the wheel on which the cog wheels are mounted will nee- essarily rotate. A steering apparatus, whereby the rudder ‘can be controlled and operated by one man, ‘even in heavy wheather, has recently been | patented by Mr. R. O. Toole, ot Perth Am- j boy, N. J. With the steering wheel shaft is connected, by a pair of gear wheels, a drum ‘to receive the redder chains, the said drum | being placed upon a shaft connected at one | end with the rudder wheel frame, and at the ; other end with a bracket on the vessel’s deck. Itis claimed that by a very simple arrangemeut of the wheel, the labor of steer- ing a vessel is greatly diminished.— Scientific American. A COLLISION accurred on the 26th oft Eddystone light, English Channel, between. the French steamer St. Germain, from Havre for New York, and the steamer Woodburn from the East, by way of the Suez Caml, The Woodburn immediately sank, and eighteen of her crew were drowned. The St. Germain, disabled, arrived at Plymouth and landed the passingers saved from the Woodburn,